Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive 21st-century economy.

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

In this eye-opening account, Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice. Not only is the cliché flawed - preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work - but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do.

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

Why have history's greatest minds - from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson along with today's top performers, from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities - embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers a daily devotional of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way much of what we do can be defined as being motivators. From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.

Idrees Haddad says:"Great insights into what motivates and demotivates"

Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey show how our individual beliefs - along with the collective mindsets in our organizations - combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

Ego Is the Enemy

"While the history books are filled with tales of obsessive visionary geniuses who remade the world in their images with sheer, almost irrational force, I've found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition." (From the prologue)

When it comes to health, there is one criminally overlooked element: sleep. Good sleep helps you shed fat for good, stave off disease, stay productive, and improve virtually every function of your mind and body. That's what Shawn Stevenson learned when a degenerative bone disease crushed his dream of becoming a professional athlete. Like many of us, he gave up on his health and his body...until he decided there must be a better way.

amy says:"What I needed to create a great morning and bed time routine"

I Know What to Do, So Why Don't I Do It?: The New Science of Self-Discipline

You might think laziness, lack of willpower, and/or low motivation are to blame for the fact that you aren't achieving your goals. But fascinating research in the field of psychoneuroimmunology has revealed another, far more likely possibility. One with the potential to transform your life in a dramatic way.

How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life

In How to Have a Good Day, economist and former McKinsey partner Caroline Webb shows listeners how to use recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform their approaches to everyday working life. Advances in these behavioral sciences are giving us ever better understanding of how our brains work, why we make the choices we do, and what it takes for us to be at our best.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

In this book Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create lives that are both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of whom or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

Combining cutting-edge research with practical findings, Focus delves into the science of attention in all its varieties, presenting a long overdue discussion of this little-noticed and under-rated mental asset. In an era of unstoppable distractions, Goleman persuasively argues that now more than ever we must learn to sharpen focus if we are to survive in a complex world.

The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind

Meditation offers, in addition to its many other benefits, a method for achieving previously inconceivable levels of concentration. Author B. Alan Wallace has nearly 30 years' practice in attention-enhancing meditation, including a retreat he performed under the guidance of the Dalai Lama. An active participant in the much-publicized dialogues between Buddhists and scientists, Alan is uniquely qualified to speak intelligently to both camps, and The Attention Revolution is the definitive presentation of his knowledge.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life

Present moment awareness is an essential ingredient in life if one expects to experience any degree of authentic peace and contentment. It has been acknowledged for centuries as the cornerstone of spiritual awakening in all traditions of Eastern thought. In the West, however, it is still a relatively unrecognized concept for living. The Western mind is always restless, never content with the moment.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics - as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters - this painstakingly researched book explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don't merely act differently. They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

The path to personal and professional fulfillment is rarely straight. Ask anyone who has achieved his or her biggest goals or whose relationships thrive, and you'll hear stories of many unexpected detours along the way. What separates those who master these challenges and those who get derailed? The answer is agility - emotional agility.

BBQ Fan says:"Excellent subject but listening is not everyone's cup of tea"

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

With Give and Take, Adam Grant not only introduced a landmark new paradigm for success but also established himself as one of his generation's most compelling and provocative thought leaders. In Originals, he again addresses the challenge of improving the world but now from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

We are stuck, stymied, frustrated. But it needn't be this way. There is a formula for success that's been followed by the icons of history - from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs - a formula that let them turn obstacles into opportunities. Faced with impossible situations, they found the astounding triumphs we all seek.

The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy

Chris Bailey turned down lucrative job offers to pursue a lifelong dream - to spend a year performing a deep dive experiment into the pursuit of productivity, a subject he had been enamored with since he was a teenager. After obtaining his business degree, he created a blog to chronicle a year-long series of productivity experiments he conducted on himself, where he also continued his research and interviews with some of the world's foremost experts, from Charles Duhigg to David Allen.

Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

We've come to misunderstand curiosity, mistaking diversive curiosity, our attraction to novel stimuli, as the real thing. This leaves us floundering in a world of Angry Birds, live tweeting, and fleeting, click-through distractions. Leslie shows how these distractions have led to a decline in deep, sustained quests for knowledge and understanding - what he calls epistemic curiosity - which relies on effort and persistence, and empathic curiosity, which leads us to wonder about the thoughts and feelings of others.

Publisher's Summary

In Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher makes the argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it.

Gallagher grapples with provocative questions -- Can we train our focus? What's different about the way creative people pay attention? Why do we often zero in on the wrong factors when making big decisions? -- driving us to reconsider what we think we know about attention.

As suggested by the expression "pay attention," this cognitive currency is a finite resource that we must learn to spend wisely. In Rapt, Gallagher introduces us to a diverse cast of characters -- artists and ranchers, birders and scientists -- who have learned to do just that and whose stories are profound lessons in the art of living the interested life.

No matter what your quotient of wealth, looks, brains, or fame, increasing your satisfaction means focusing more on what really interests you and less on what doesn't. In asserting its groundbreaking thesis -- the wise investment of your attention is the single most important thing you can do to improve your well-being -- Rapt yields fresh insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be fully alive.

Winifred Gallagher has turned mindfulness on its head in "Rapt." In this book she pays particular attention to the factors fostering and benefits of paying attention, concentration, and mental focus. The chapters on relationships, productivity, decisions, and creativity were of great practical benefit. She tells you the why and the how at every stage. This volume is well worth the time and money invested.

A related book, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, makes a wonderful companion listen and is also available from Audible.

The work presents an impressive amount of research, related (often indirectly) to the phenomenon of human attention, albeit in slightly biased fashion. To this reader, the author often turned what should have been an objective presentation of the data into an indictment of Western culture. Intentional or not, those highly sensitive to such things be warned. When you get past this, however, the book does manage to impart many useful insights and is, on the whole, worth a listen.

whereas Rapt starts slow it has a stronger second half. the first part reviews what we mostly already know. okay. fine. we need to recall common knowledge which is usually "dull" since we already know it. the second half of the book, however, finally provides the information and research for which the reader has come searching: 1) our attention and our choice of focus matter more than we realize in our technological world, 2) multi-tasking may be a myth, and 3) brain function studies are so worth knowing about. imo, then, the second half of the book makes the entire book worth an attentive listen. inquiring minds want to know. and some things are worth the extra time.

This book is a real challenge to stick with at the beginning. The author seems to try too hard with a lot of flowery overly descriptive language. Didn't impress me - it irritated me! But I hung in there and 'focused' on the messages and suprisingly it turned into an interesting read.

Many familiar studies along with more that I was not aware of summarized without getting too bogged down in the details. More a focus on what to learn from each study and how to organize all the ideas around common themes. I'll need to listen to it a few more times before I'll be able to pull out and use the ideas that are most aligned with my lifestyle. I look forward to listening to it more.

It was so good that I listened to it 5 times. I'll continue to listen to it just to make sure that I don't miss anything. Powerful Stuff... It is like an extra-boost to increase your performance in life/time management by 10 folds. This book is a must for high performers/achievers or to those who wants to decrease/manage stress by working effectively and efficiency.

Essentially this is a very good book, but it's one you really have to work at to absorb. It's not an easy listen by any means. That's because content has a fairly dense, text book-like tone to it.

If you get it you'll need to sit and listen to it without any distractions. Don't try driving, walking or doing household chores with this one on, or you'll miss out on what she has to say.

It's a psychology book of sorts - written with the aim of helping us develop better minds and it really is deep and insightful.

Writing easily digestible prose is clearly not the author's strong point though. She relies on a logical, left-brain, technical type of language throughout. Her words are a bit too big and grown-up for my taste; lots of syllables, and she's not the best at telling engaging stories.

Nevertheless, as someone seriously interested self improvement I found it well worth my attention. I just wish they'd chosen a different narrator - or at least made a more subtly nuanced recording. It's not that the reader is terrible. It's just that she doesn't manage to bring the words alive. She reads way too fast and she's too far from the microphone to sound intimate and engaging. As such, the words go in one ear and out the other.

This kind of content calls for far more variation in pitch, pace pausing and more expression to hold attention well. Ironic, as the book is all about attention.

Couldn't stop Listening, Rewinding, then getting lost in the thoughts that the book triggers. The author describes how attention affects many areas of our lives such as motivation, creativity and happiness. Very good book!